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How Comparative Concepts and Descriptive Linguistic Categories Are Different

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How Comparative Concepts and Descriptive Linguistic Categories Are Different View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ZENODO 1 How comparative concepts and descriptive linguistic categories are different Martin Haspelmath first version, March 2017 Abstract. This paper reasserts the fundamental conceptual distinction between language- particular categories of individual languages, defined within particular systems, and comparative concepts at the cross-linguistic level, defined in substantive terms. The paper argues that comparative concepts are also widely used in other sciences, and that they are always distinct from social categories, of which linguistic categories are special instances. Some linguists (especially in the generative tradition) assume that linguistic categories are natural kinds (like biological species, or chemical elements) and thus need not be defined, but can be recognized by their symptoms, which may be different in different languages. I also note that category-like comparative concepts are sometimes very similar to categories, and that different languages may sometimes be described in a unitary commensurable mode, thus blurring (but not questioning) the distinction. Finally, I note that cross- linguistic claims must be interpreted as being about the facts of languages, not about the incommensurable systems of languages. 1. Introduction To make lasting progress in linguistics, we need cumulative research results and replicability of each other’s claims. Cumulativity and replicability are not often emphasized by linguists, and one of the reasons why these seem difficult is that often we cannot even agree what we mean by our technical terms. Often this seems to be because we do not distinguish clearly enough between descriptive categories of individual languages and comparative concepts for cross-linguistic studies. We routinely use the same terms for both (e.g. ergative, or relative clause, or optative mood), but I have argued that we cannot equate the two kinds of concepts (Haspelmath 2010). The first published critique of my 2010 proposal was van der Auwera & Sahoo (2015), but in the meantime, several further articles discussing this methodological distinction have appeared (especially the papers collected by Plank 2016 and Lehmann 2016). I will use the opportunity of this paper to address a number of different points that have come up in the discussion of the issues over the last few years. Overall, I have few disagreements with those linguists that work in a broadly Boasian and/or Greenbergian tradition. But it is clear that some of my claims SEEM controversial, so I hope that this paper will clarify a few issues. (I do have some real disagreements with linguists who assume innate cross-linguistic categories; see §6-7 below.) In this paper, I provide further justification for the claim in (1), but in addition, I put special emphasis on the observation that the general category presumption is wrong for linguistics (see 2). (1) (ontological difference) Comparative concepts are a different kind of entity than descriptive categories (cf. §5). 2 (2) (general category fallacy) We do not learn anything about particular languages merely by observing that category A in language 1 is similar to category B in language 2, or by putting both into the same general category C (cf. §6). For example, by saying that the Spanish-specific construction [estar V-ndo] ‘be V-ing’ is an instance of the general category “progressive”, we do not learn anything that goes beyond what we need to know for a description of this construction anyway. Thus, general categories do not by themselves advance our knowledge, although there are of course many ways in which information about another language or knowledge of cross- linguistic patterns can help describers to identify all the properties of the construction. This is worth emphasizing, because there is a constant temptation to think that subsuming a language-particular descriptive category under a general category does add information. We experience the usefulness of the general category presumption every day: When a young woman introduces a young man as her boyfriend, I can make certain further inferences how the two will behave which are usually very helpful for further interaction; and when I’m told that a certain kind of infusion is real tea (made from Camellia sinensis), I have different expectation concerning its effects than if it is a herbal tea made of chamomile. It is important to understand why this is a fallacy in comparative linguistics. Briefly, the answer is that the cross-linguistic comparative concepts (like “progressive”) are not pre-established categories that exist independently of the comparison. Different languages represent historical accidents, and (unless they influenced each other via language contact) the categories of one language have no causal connection to the categories of another language. By contrast, the categories ‘boyfriend’ and Camellia sinensis do exist independently of particular circumstances, and of someone becomes a boyfriend or if a new tea plant arises, this is causally connected to the pre- established category. I will elaborate on this point later on, but first I discuss a number of different kinds of comparative concepts (§2). Subsequent sections will address a range of additional issues that have come up in the literature on comparative concepts and descriptive categories. 2. Kinds of comparative concepts Comparative concepts can be divided into two main types: CATEGORY-LIKE comparative concepts and ETIC comparative concepts. Category-like comparative concepts are the most difficult to deal with, but also the most familiar type of comparative concept. Some examples of category-like comparative concepts are given in Table 1, listed together with chapters from WALS that make use of them. 3 Table 1. Some category-like comparative concepts lateral consonant Maddieson (2005a) syllable Maddieson (2005b) reduplication Rubino (2005) subject, object, verb Dryer (2005) independent personal pronoun Siewierska (2005) adnominal demonstrative Diessel (2005) future tense Dahl & Velupillai (2005) applicative construction Polinsky (2005) ‘hand’, ‘arm’ Brown (2005) Some of these are phonetically based (e.g. lateral consonant) or semantically based (e.g. ‘hand’, ‘arm’). But most category-like comparative concepts which are familiar from typology are HYBRID comparative concepts (Croft 2016: 3), i.e. they include both semantic-functional aspects and formal aspects in their definition. For example, a future tense form is a verb form which includes a marker that indicates future time reference of the situation denoted by the verb. Crucially, the form must include a grammatical marker, i.e. a formally defined entitity,1 and this marker must occur on a particular class of roots (namely verb roots). The seven category-like comparative concepts defined in Haspelmath 2010: §5) are all of this type, as are the five concepts defined in Haspelmath (2009: §6). Another type of category-like comparative concept is known by terms that are not derived from grammars of particular languages. For the typology of argument coding, the role-types S, A, P, T and R, along with the notion of alignment, have proven very useful (Haspelmath 2011a), and for the typology of subordination, Cristofaro (2003) makes extensive use of the notion of balanced subordination and deranked subordination. The abstract concepts of locus (head-marking and dependent-marking, Nichols 1992) and branching direction (Dryer 1992) have been important in typology, but need not play any role in particular languages. The notions of adpossessive construction (Haspelmath 2017) or existential construction (Creissels 2017) have also proven very useful, though many grammatical descriptions make no use of these notions. They are still category-like, but more removed from the concepts in Table 1. What is typical of these concepts is that they are defined more narrowly than the corresponding language-particular categories. For example, an adpossessive (= adnominal possessive) construction is defined as a construction that expresses kinship relations, part-whole relations, and/or ownership relations (cf. Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2003), but in individual languages, such constructions normally express other relations as well (e.g. my chair ‘the chair I am sitting on’, or your school ‘the school that you are attending’).2 1 A grammatical marker can be defined as a formative (or morph) that cannot occur on its own, but occurs in close association to a major-class root (or in second position of the clause), that cannot be focused, and that expresses an abstract meaning which may correspond to nothing in a translation to another language. 2 Thus, I disagree with Lander & Arkadiev’s (2016: 404) statement that „if comparative concepts are not felt to be relevant for the grammars of different languages, they are usually not viable“. On the contrary: Many comparative concepts (e.g. all the etic ones) are not usable for language description, and conversely, some of the well-known category-like concepts that are not viable as comparative concepts (see (8) in §8 below) work well in individual languages. 4 But typologists also work with comparative concepts that are not category-like, but are meanings or functions, often of a type that would not be expected to be the meaning of a single form. In semantic-map studies, for example (e.g. Haspelmath 2003; van der Auwera & Temürcü 2006), the nodes on the map are meanings or functions (or uses) that are employed
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